CMP- Another take

Another take on the Cabinet Mission Plan
for India's Constitutional question

The zenith of Muslim League's rising power
over
India occured
during the period that the Cabinet Mission Plan(CMP) was being
discussed in mid-1946, courtesy the British; when the British offered
the Muslim League not only a separate constitution for Pakistan but
also equality for a virtually sovereign Pakistan with Hindustan in the
Indian Union's central executive and legislature.

By Jinnah's own demand, under the CMP, the Pakistan constitution would
be virtually sovereign and the combined Indian Union constitution of
Hindustan and Pakistan would not be allowed even
to incorporate fundamental rights or currency or trade or credit
policy. Nor would the Union Constituent Assembly be able
to influence
the Pakistan constitution in any way. The
subjects dealt with at the Union level would be only three-foreign
affairs, defence and communications dealing with defence.
The British initially offered to give Jinnah equality of representation
in the Union Constituent Assembly and the Union legislature
between a
Pakistani state of 90 million and a Hindustani state of 190 million but
Congress objections expressed by Azad and Gandhi caused them to change
that offer. Hence, instead of equality, the Cabinet Mission Plan
offered Muslims a communal
veto over the contents of the Union Constitution (which Congress
accepted) and a similar communal veto on the affairs of the future
Union executive and legislature (which Congress initially rejected).

In addition, in the CMP, the British insisted on compulsory grouping of
provinces,
which meant that the Pakistan group, a virtually sovereign state with
its own constitution, legislature, currency and its own army too (if
Jinnah got his demand on that point), would have its borders on
the N.
Delhi outskirts.

The Muslim League (ML) in June 1946 in a resolution suggested by the
British
themselves, declared that they were accepting the CMP because the
compulsory grouping scheme provided an inherent basis for a wholly
sovereign Pakistan and that Muslims would fight to the last until they
achieved a wholly sovereign Pakistan.

Thus under the united India of the CMP, New Delhi would have had
nothing to
do with adjacent areas of Haryana or most points north except in
matters
of foreign policy and defence. After Muslims had achieved their
declared goal of a wholly independent sovereign Pakistan in the
intervening years, the Indo-Pak international border today would be on
N.Delhi outskirts.

The Muslim League accepted the CMP with the condition that it would
continue to work for a completely sovereign Pakistan. Congress accepted
the CMP with the condition that it would adhere to its own
interpretation of grouping of provinces which was that no province
could be compelled to join a group and submit itself to the
constitution written by that group. In his famous press conference for
which he is berated even today, Nehru was only stating again what
Congress resolutions and Azad's own letters to the Delegation/Viceroy
had already stated on this.

Jinnah was unhappy not to get parity of Pakistan and Hindustan in the
Union Constituent Assembly and if he yielded to the Congress position
on
compulsory grouping, he would
most likely also not get separate constitution-making bodies and hence,
nor a separate
Pakistan constitution. Meanwhile, the Viceroy was also refusing to hand
over the
interim national government to the Muslim League on the League's terms
because it was politically risky for Labour Prime Minister Attlee to
suppress the
Congress [CMP(12C)](Churchill
who had lost the elections in 1945 would have had
no
such scruples).

So Jinnah withdrew his acceptance of the CMP citing betrayal by the
Viceroy and called Direct Action day.

Earlier, during the runup to the CMP in 1946, the British had also been
happy to
offer
to Jinnah the prospect of other sorts of parity as well. Jinnah and
Muslim League had hinted at equality between Muslims and Hindus in the
administration
and services ( Muslims were 25% of the population and non Muslims 75%
of
the population) which Congress refused to accept saying that it was
unsustainable and would lead to frustration and social unrest.

However, having made such a demand, there was no guarantee that Jinnah
would not
have used the communal veto in the Union Constituent Assembly to
enforce it. The loss of Muslim-nonMuslim parity in administration and
services might be something that the supporters of CMP rue but I am not
one of those. Quotas which are out of proportion of the population
ratios have lead to civil war in other parts of the world and I doubt
any of those was as skewed as equating the government posts available
for 25% of a population to those available for the remaining 75%
population.

With respect to parity in the Union Executive or Union Cabinet, Jinnah
essentially said
'Congress had been willing to give caste Hindu-Muslim parity in 1945 so
they should now accept my demand of parity between Congress and Muslim
League'. What he meant by parity is better understood by noting that
in the Constituent Assembly, the Congress had won 201 seats and Muslim
League had won 73.

In addition to demanding League-Congress parity, Jinnah also insisted
that
there must be no Scheduled Castes and no Muslims in the Congress quota
and Congress must have only caste Hindu ministers. The Congress
refused to yield on this, claiming the right to put forward a Congress
Scheduled Caste nominee (because the Congress had won most of the
Scheduled Caste seats in the provincial legislatures and the
Constituent Assembly). The Congress also appointed a nationalist Muslim
in their quota. It was only then that, against the Viceroy's
advice,
Jinnah appointed
Jogendranath Mandal as ML's own Scheduled Caste nominee, which is
cited as "proof" of Muslim League and the Pakistan
movement's "investedness" in Pakistan's non Muslims. (whereas see Extra(2) where
Jinnah spells out explicitly that a future Pakistan's
non Muslims should have no say in the creation of Pakistan).

Direct Action day was also an effort to change the Congress stance on
parity. Let me remind you that was when the Congress had 201 and the ML
had 73
in the Constituent Assembly. What would have happened with respect to
future Union governments when the minority party Muslim League
continued to refuse to
be in a minority as it had since 1939?

The British were good at promising and Jinnah was good at demanding
from each other many things, but neither could actually enforce the
reality and principle of all these 'parities', 'vetoes' and
'compulsory'
interpretations - they needed the Congress to agree.

Some who choose to disregard the explicitness of Jinnah's and the
Muslim
League's
nationwide campaign from
1940-1947 for an independent sovereign
Pakistan, rue today- why didn't the majority party,
community and region
surrender and submit to these parities and vetoes by Jinnah and the
Muslim
League over future Indians, over India's constitution, over India's
territorial rights, over India's defence and even over the Congress's
choice of national
ideology? Why didn't Congress accept Jinnah's and the ML's veto
over
all
these until the time, when as Jinnah's /Muslim League's resolution
said, a
fully sovereign Pakistan was attained?

The question is, was their expectation of Congress and
"Hindustani" surrender to the Muslim League and "Pakistan" vetoes
a
reasonable or rational expectation, given that it would have led
to a continuance of Muslim League "blackmail" over secession which
dated back at least to their Lahore Resolution of 1940? The CMP
in
fact, institutionalized
a perpetual threat of secession. Can a nation or a state be
successfully constructed around such a threat ?

Jinnah even implicitly demanded in October 1946 (CMP(17)) that the
national government be
handed over to the Muslim League as Congressmen were "overrated and had
reached their position only because they had gone to jail, that the
personnel of the Muslim League was really completely superior in
administrative capacity".

If the British and the Muslim League had, with or without the Congress,
managed to enforce their (in my view) unsustainable
interpretation of
the CMP on
India, it would have lead firstly, to failure to write an Indian
constitution. The implementation of the CMP's basic principle of a
smaller population exerting a veto over the future of a larger
population on a communal basis would also have lead to a holocaust much
worse than that of Partition and the Congress could have done nothing
about it. It was much better to fight any number of Indo-Pak wars than
to have a civil war in India.

Supporting material
available on this site:

The following give a good idea of where the British and Jinnah were
coming
from. It is well to remember that the records of these conversations
were not de-classified until the mid '70s to mid '80s and the Congress
was prob. not privy to these discussions at the time, though they might
have had 'inside' sources among the Indian civil servants.

It is often said that the CMP was Maulana Azad's plan. In his later
book 'India Wins Freedom', Maulana Azad himself wrote that he had been
in favor of the CMP. In fact, Azad's plan differed from the CMP in a
number of essential respects. At various times in 1946 Azad had stated
he was
against two constitution-making bodies and he was against compulsory
grouping. He wanted to incorporate the desired autonomy of
Muslim-majority
provinces not as compulsory groupings and separate constitutions on
communal basis as the CMP specified but as a list of optional subjects
which provinces would choose to assign to centre with residuary powers
vested with the provinces.

Jinnah's talk with Woodrow Wyatt on interim government on June 11 1946: CMP(10)
- Jinnah's Conversations with Major Wyatt(22) on the interim government,
11
June 1946
In late July 1946, ML and Jinnah withdrew from the Cabinet Mission Plan
citing essentially three things- Viceroy Wavell's position on the
Interim government composition, Sir Stafford Cripp's address to the
British Parliament and the Congress/Nehru stance on CMP. On the same
day the Muslim League called for Direct Action. J. Nehru has been made
the historical whipping boy for ML's withdrawal from the CMP and is
blamed for his words in a press conference.